Cautious welcome to truce

Turkey and the EU have welcomed a nationwide truce for Syria brokered by the US and Russia but have warned that further action is needed.

A rejuvenated truce that will compel President Bashar Assad’s air and ground forces to pull back and allow new flows of badly needed humanitarian aid.
Those details emerged Saturday as US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov capped another marathon meeting in Geneva to present their latest ambitious push to end Syria’s devastating and complex war.
The potential breakthrough deal, which launches a nationwide cessation of hostilities by sundown Monday, will hinge on compliance by Assad’s Russian-backed forces and US-supported rebel groups, plus key regional powers such as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia with hands directly or indirectly in Syria’s 5-1/2 years of carnage.
“We believe the plan as it is set forth — if implemented, if followed — has the ability to provide a turning point, a moment of change,” Kerry said as he and Lavrov laid out the contours, but admittedly not too much fine print, of the hard-won accord.
The ultimate hope is to silence the Syrian guns so that the long-stalled peace process under UN mediation can resume between Assad’s envoys and representatives of the opposition, while the two world powers focus on battling radicals.
The deal, at least publicly and for now, appears to overcome months of distrust between Russia and the US that President Barack Obama had cited less than a week ago.
Now, the two powers are lining up in an unlikely new military partnership targeting Daesh and Al-Qaeda-linked militants, while trying to prod Assad and opposition groups to end a civil war that has killed up to 500,000 people and displaced millions. “This is just the beginning of our new relations,” Lavrov said of the US
Meanwhile, jets struck a busy market place in the rebel-held Syrian city of Idlib on Saturday, killing at least 25 people, including children and women, and injuring dozens, rescue workers and residents said.
Two civil defense workers told Reuters via Internet that bodies were still being pulled out of the rubble of collapsed buildings in a market place in the city that is the provincial capital of the northwestern province of Idlib.
One resident and rescue workers say they thought that the jets were Russian, which they said can be identified by their high altitude flying in sorties, unlike Syrian helicopters that hit at lower altitudes.

Source: Arab News